A player actually found the *ultimate treasure* of CWOUN. Good job! Have some ~official developer-made fan art~:

I also made a neat little graph to illustrate how ESA has progressed throughout the years:

Currently the game’s at 86%! I think I’ll stop using percents once I hit 90%, since the final polishing etc will probably take quite a while.

I’m quite happy with how it looks!

Also I recently got a couple game ideas I think to be quite neat. Maybe there’ll be a game made out of one of them? Who knows!

So I finally took my time and contacted the creator of the Lacewing protocol, and it turned out that the server hadn’t died but instead moved to a different address. So well, without any other additions, here’s the The server is alive! update! The last couple versions have also been otherwise broken, but that matters not since the server was unavailable anyway.

GET THE UPDATE HERE!

For reference, the server and port the game uses are
villy.net
6121

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Turned out that writing ‘articles’ about problems in my own games was fun and seemed to get a positive response and actually really nice feedback, so let’s have ESA design problem huffery-puffery #2!

I just played around in the temple area to test some stuff (small dust particles as you walk in the aream yay!), and man is the area horrendous. I could really feel my disinterest in working on the game as I walked around there. I had planned for the area to be mainly about puzzles and traps, and there were those (especially the latter), but they were almost universally obtuse, unfun and often very player-unfriendly, designed mostly without thinking of how a player first seeing them might react. To list some of the horrible things:

• Insta-kill traps
• Another trap that deals 10 damage at a time where the player might have 15
• A puzzle with the only hint located on another room’s wall, said room being also hidden and the hint being partially blocked by tiles
• Two bosses being literally one room from each other
• A boss having insta-kill traps between it and the next save point, so that the player might instantly die after beating the boss but before saving

I felt really disappointed at myself. At the moment I feel that the only way to really approach this problem is to actually redo most of the temple. Redesigning the area shouldn’t be that difficult, considering that I know where the area starts and ends, and all the things that should be found within. Still, it might be quite a large undertaking, although it’d probably pay off very well.
I have some ideas on how this might be improved; it’d probably require redoing some of the enemies and most of the area itself, but all in all I think it could be worth it. I’ll probably finish the penultimate area first, though!

(To be honest, the temple tileset is also quite ugly.)

Indiestatik did a really nice and kind writeup of CWOUN. Thanks, guys! It seems that the game didn’t really rouse much interest, but I suppose that was to be expected… I’ll update some stuff later when I feel less like working on ESA.

Read the article here!